Bring up pedophile priests and the impenetrable Catholic Church conspiracy cover-up and emotions ratchet up quickly. Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, based on TheBoston Globe’s meticulous examination of the denial and frequent reassignment of collared sexual predators, holds emotion at arm’s length. Spotlight is about the process and pain of pure investigative journalism. We catch brief glimpses of the psychological effects of burying the truth, but this is not the victims’ story, it’s the reporter’s journey from rumor to devastating fact.

The film’s title refers to the Globe’s special investigative reporting team who latches onto a subject and follows it all the way down the rabbit hole shining a bright light on its dark secrets. Every time a priest popped up in the news accused of molesting 30 or so children, the ranking bishops and cardinals would instinctively rail about a few bad apples spoiling the bunch and how isolated these events are. Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson (Michael Keaton, Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)) and his team of intrepid researchers discover the words ‘few’ and ‘isolated’ are outright lies.

Unlike contemporary McNews websites and tweets, in 2001, newspapers still employed a large staff of talented journalists. Before google was a verb and a sizeable chuck of human history was at your fingertips, archivists would hunt and peck for hardcopy ‘clips’, surf spools of microfilm, and dust off obscure reference volumes to fact check stories. McCarthy films a couple montages of the ensemble cast digging through dusty files and flipping through thousands of pages. The newspaper’s librarians collect a cart full of material and deliver tangible papers and folders rather than clicking the ‘attach’ icon on an e-mail.

Since every film remotely about a reporter is compared to All the President’s Men, there are echoes of Woodward and Bernstein unraveling Watergate’s onion layers but there are no secret meetings in underground garages with trench coat-clad men obscured in shadows. The Spotlight reporters boldly track down victims, defense lawyers suspected of making hushed-up deals with accused priests, and we watch them stare at influential local government and civic leaders urging them to protect their city and let it go.

Spotlight’s most relentless sleuth is Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo, Avengers: Age of Ultron). Living in a bare bones bachelor pad because his off-screen wife did not sign on to his workaholic addiction, Mike literally chases his leads down the street. He hounds an overworked defense lawyer (Stanley Tucci, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1), he fights city hall’s records office, and is respected as the office truth teller unafraid to let his superiors know when he believes they are dragging their feet or straying off the path.

Spotlight’s lone female journalist, Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), tracks down the majority of the known victims and we absorb their life-shattering stories of horrific abuse at the hands of men they considered God. Sacha even stumbles into an accused priest and his rationale is jaw dropping. Spotlight’s fourth member, Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), runs out of his house in the middle of the night down the street when he learns a church treatment center is only a few houses away. Treatment center is code for a house the church lumps the pedophile priests into while they figure out where to move them next. These centers are in suburban neighborhoods next door to elementary schools and playgrounds.

While the Spotlight team is mostly Boston born and raised, the brass, consisting of editors Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber, Fading Gigolo) and Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery, Ant-Man), are respectively the outsider catalyst and suspicious middleman of the bunch. Baron, newly arrived from Miami, is frequently referred to as ‘the Jew’ and considered an interloper looking to make a name for himself before he moves on again. McCarthy, who co-wrote the screenplay with John Singer, makes interesting use of Ben Bradlee, Jr., a man sporting a very famous surname in investigative journalism. McCarthy and Singer manipulate our thoughts on Bradlee’s motivations and loyalties until they slyly reveal how they set us up all along.

There is no shocking climax or big reveal making Spotlight land an extra punch. It is about process, chiseling away at the facts, and absorbing the morbid bits and pieces as they are uncovered. The facts and figures we learn about the percentage of priests who prey on the young and their methodology is unsettling at the very least and downright infuriating when we learn how much effort the men behind the curtains put in to contain the epidemic. Boston is a heavy Catholic city and the Church used to hold unlimited, unchecked power; they protected their own. Almost 15 years later, church membership is down across the globe; I wonder if it had to be that way if certain measures were taken early on to confront the enemy instead of shielding it.